Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. Hey, it's Bradley. How you doing? There is a minor audio problem for the first 90 seconds of this podcast. So please just bear with us, get through it, and it'll all then be cool. And I promise this will not happen again next week. Thanks. All right. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. It's a Tuesday episode, so with us is our friend and producer, Hugo Lindgren. Hugo, how you doing?
B (0:27)
I'm just going to open some water. A special look at that for the listeners.
A (0:32)
What do we got today?
B (0:34)
We got you talking about an essay you wrote. Sort of. It's actually, I think it's really about zero some people and the effect that they have on the rest of us, I think. So. I think that's the core of it. But it sort of, it starts in a slightly different place. But why don't we, when we start with that, we're going to talk about, obviously, some of the news stuff. After that, we're going to talk about the war a little bit. We're going to talk about, I want to, I want to go a little bit into the anthropic Pentagon situation. And then you have this sort of theory of the composite city that we're going to spend some time.
A (1:04)
Oh, yeah, yeah.
B (1:05)
So we're going to talk about that, too.
A (1:06)
All right. So, so here's the start. So this is the substack that's going up tomorrow or Tuesday, I guess. And it started I was at an event on Thursday in D.C. for a group called the Public Service Alignment alliance. And they are a nonprofit marketplace that is specifically meant to help former and current public servants who are under threat of violence just for doing their job. That could be the political assassinations that we've seen over the past couple of years. It could be judges getting threatened. It could be poll workers getting threatened. It could be you know, basically, really, it seems to now happen across the board in anything from someone providing a very basic governmental service to people making policy at a very high level. And there just was not a norm until relatively recently in this country. I mean, there are always been examples of political violence. You know, I don't know, half four or five presidents have been assassinated and more shot. So, like, it's not that that hasn't existed, but we seem to be in a world now where there's a notion you could obviously have social media and Trump both contribute to this, just sort of the general vibe that comes from it, which is, you know, if you don't like someone or something, violence is an acceptable solution to it. And because now with the prevalence of doxing and the ability to just find people's information pretty quickly through the Internet, there is a real epidemic now of it. And so PSA has built a marketplace run by this woman, Isabella, who's just. She was the deputy chief of staff at Homeland Security, incredibly talented. And what they do is they basically find ways to take the public servants who don't make much money under threat and help them. So they've convinced alarm service companies to provide it at a massive discount, they've convinced law firms to provide services at a massive discount, they've convinced places that can do data privacy. So all of that kind of stuff. But obviously the problem keeps growing. And so they had a small event in D.C. on Thursday and I was talking to where it started with Jim Murray, who was the head of the Secret Service Service under Trump. And he was at this meeting, he works at coreweave now. And because he was in government politics and then he was in tech, he's in tech now. The whole thing started because we were chatting before the event began, just about kind of the world of politics, the world of tech, and how they were less dissimilar than it might appear. And so I started writing it down. And so let's say you're graduating from college and you have two job offers. One is to work for an early stage tech startup and one is to work on a political career campaign. So the jobs on their face sound very different, but. But I think once you look at it, they're not. Right. So a political campaign centers around the candidate and the candidate is usually an ambitious, hard charging, charismatic person with a vision and a deep need for success and recognition. Right. An early stage tech startup centers around the founder, usually an ambitious, hard charging, charismatic person with a vision and a deep seated need for success and recognition. Political campaigns are often staffed by young, enthusiastic, energetic people who believe in the cause and think that success can result in some sort of meaningful societal change. Early stage tech startups are often staffed by young, enthusiastic, energetic people who believe in the cause and both want to make money, but also think the company's product can make people's lives better. They're both working towards a very specific goal. It's the election for the campaign, obviously it's the exit for the startup. They both have their own sets of media that focus just relentlessly on their success and their failure. They both raise money and they both see their donors and or investors as a huge pain in the ass. Poll numbers and growth Numbers mirror each other. Go to market and get out the vote. Do too. So there's a lot of similarities. And yet, in my experience, because I work in both of these worlds, each group often sees the other in the wrong light. Right. And there are stereotypes that I know are unfounded. Right. People who work in tech and in business are not fundamentally greedy or unethical or rapacious. And people who work in government and politics are not fundamentally dumb or lazy or corrupt. Those are just stereotypes that aren't even remotely true in most cases. And I've been lucky, I think, to see the world from some different perspectives. I've worked in tech, politics, government, media, retail, philanthropy. I've lived in different parts of the US the work we do across all of our different things here takes place across all 50 states. And so, and especially when you work in politics, you kind of deal with people from every background, at every level, every, everything. So when you put all that together, I think what I've learned is ultimately people are a lot more similar than they are different. In fact, a good example would be when you work in politics, you end up having, especially if it's in any sort of diverse city or anything like that, a really non intentional, diverse friend group of friends and colleagues, because you have to deal with everyone, right? And therefore political operations who are seeking votes from lots of different communities have people who are experts in the black community, different parts of the Latino community, Asian, gay, progressive women, whatever it might be. And even though there are differences between every human being, if at your heart you're a political operative, you have more in common with other political operatives, even if, by the way, they work on totally the other side from an ideological standpoint than you do with pretty much anyone else. And like, I could sit down with any political operative from anywhere and if everyone just dropped all the pretense and bullshit, have a really fun conversation for an hour? Almost.